tachyonbeam

That's fair. If self-driving cars pan out, then ideally, we'll soon be able to live in a world where we can all ride in electric cars without owning one. These self-driving electric taxis can then charge at fast chargers on lots somewhere out of sight.

Apart from that, why invest in charging infrastructure? Probably because, even though we've made it inconvenient to drive, some people insist on owning a car in the city. Maybe they are just being idiots, or maybe they need it for their work/business. If we don't make it more convenient to go electric, they will just stick with gas cars. Every little bit counts.

Trains, yes sure, but people love the convenience of a door-to-door service. I think Elon's idea of electric robotaxis and tunnels to alleviate traffic is not a bad one. It could work. We could also eventually have hyperloop "pods" that route themselves in a network tunnel underground. This would make it possible to avoid having to transfer from one train to another multiple times. Sounds sci-fi? Sure, but without a vision, there's no innovation.

Would like to see some stats, specifically what percentage of their yearly spending goes into clean energy. Also useful to know what they consider "clean energy", because there's no such thing as "clean natural gas".

I'm pretty sure you can opt to not pay the monthly fee to have an internet connection in your car, if you get a Tesla.

Car charging can also be scheduled to happen off peak if possible.

Yeah I used to have a decent ebike I bought for 2K, and even at that price point, I didn't bring it anywhere that I couldn't keep a constant eye on or bring inside. With a 15K ebike, you need insurance.

I was shocked when I started shopping for an electric bike, to see that in my city, there are multiple bike shops selling e-bikes from 5K to 15K a piece. I'm surprised that these businesses can all survive, because the median income before taxes here is about ~62K. I mean who's actually buying this? But I guess if you're selling 15K bikes, you only need to sell about two a month to pay the bills.

> Facebook aren't stupid, they must have a reason for collecting all this stuff. Perhaps it's just in case they might find a use case some day?

The most obvious use, I would think, is to train machine learning model. Not necessarily neural networks, it could be much simpler models. Even if you don't need the data now, it can be useful to store it for later use. Maybe at some point in the future a new model will be able to see patterns that are useful. I think they operate based on the principle that data is a valuable resource, even if not immediately useful. How much data they have about their users is one of their key advantages over smaller players.

In general though, more data about you, such as locations you visit, people you're friends with, activities you do, gives them more understanding of what kind of person you are, which is undoubtedly useful when it comes to try and sell you stuff. For example, think about friends you know really well. Presumably, you have some idea of what kinds of things they would like to buy for themselves. That's because you have a good mental model of what kind of person they are and what they like, what they might be interested in.

Facebook maybe has one big advantage over Google, which is that they are a social network. They can try to influence your tastes based on the idea that you are likely to want to try things that your friends are into. They can subtly or not so subtly show you things your friends are doing with the hope that you will want to try or buy those things too.

It's not just Opera though. Microsoft Edge is using also Webkit. I'm legit worried that if Mozilla ever tanks, we could have a complete WebKit browser monoculture.

Sure, but like I said, having some JS support is one thing, building a fast JS engine is another. The same goes for canvas, I mean, you have to realize, there is WebGL support on the web now, but also the Web Audio API, WASM, etc. It never stops growing. There's even talk about adding machine learning features to WASM.

Again, this isn't to minimize the accomplishment, this is great, it's just to say, while building a hobbyist browser must be fun for sure, and I'm sure this browser can be useful to browse many websites out there, particularly if said websites intentionally restrict which HTML features they use. However, it's probably not realistic to think you could compete with the commercial browsers. They have dozens of people who have been working full-time on those projects for two decades and they are constantly adding new features.

I think if Andreas Kling was here, he would probably agree. I'm sure his goal was never to replace Chrome/Firefox or compete with them, but rather to learn, educate, and have fun. I congratulate him on his success and for reaching the milestone of being able to sustain himself from his passion project.

IMO, it's more that the standards are overcomplicated as a result of (unhealthy) competition. This is maybe less true now, but my impression has been that until recently, Firefox and Chrome were both always racing to implement some new proprietary feature before the other browsers could design an equivalent. There were no standards. In fact, even before that, the way JavaScript was created is that Brendan Eich, at NetScape, implemented it in two weeks. The same was true of many other browser features, they were rushed into production in order to outdo other browsers and have this new feature first, and then everyone was kind of stuck having to support every half-baked feature because some websites made use of them.

I mean, it kind of is. You can make a basic browser, sure, but you'll have a hard time implementing video playback, canvas, JavaScript and everything else, while also delivering good performance and rendering everything accurately. Yes, I know his browser has JS support, but the performance is likely at least an order of magnitude slower than V8 or Firefox... And then there's CSS, and the fact that HTML, JS and CSS keep growing and having more functionality added every month. That's not to minimize his accomplishments, browsers are just immensely complex pieces of software. Complex enough that Opera killed their own browser engine because they didn't have the manpower to maintain it anymore, and are now using WebKit.

All of that being said, it all depends on your expectations. You can totally make a browser that is capable of going to web forums and posting on Hacker News, browsing the SerenityOS website and maybe even Wikipedia for instance. If you want to build something that supports pre-2005 HTML/JS, that's probably quite feasible.

Not many hobby projects of any kind for that matter. IMO he gets this kind of support not just because of the value added by SerenityOS itself, but because of the value he adds by making YouTube streams and other content. People feel like they can learn a lot about programming from him.

Competing with Elon Musk on space domination.

It's not just bots writing articles, there are already bots posting in online forums. Most people tend to align with the predominant opinion, and these commenter bots make it seem like the public opinion goes a certain way when it doesn't. Bot-written articles might still have obvious tells, but can you tell if a two-sentence comment was written by a bot? No, you probably can't.

And of course, the next level of this is to tailor the articles you see, their content, and the response you get online specifically to you. Eventually, these systems will get progressively better and influencing your specific opinion. Social media giants can also affect things like which events you end up going to, the people you meet, who you end up in a relationship with, which jobs you apply to, etc. Soon it will be possible for corporations and governments to have sophisticated, subtle, relatively fine-grained influence over your life and that of your friends. You'd better hope Google and Facebook view your success and emotional well-being as good for their profits, otherwise, they could try to optimize your life for different outcomes.

Personally, I got to the point where I realized that trying hard to make software that's useful can turn a side-project into something stressful, essentially a second job on top of my regular full-time job, which I just can't do, too much risk of burnout. Trying to turn something into a side-business adds a lot of constraints. You're not just playing anymore, you have to optimize everything towards the goal of making profit.

However, I still think you can enjoy working on things that are useful, to yourself and other people, and not for profit. The projects I'm the most proud of are projects I've shared that have been used and appreciated by many users online. You just have to keep the project small and simple, and keep your expectations low.

In other news, Marlboro has found, through rigorous scientific study, that cigarettes do not increase the risk of cancer. In fact, they may help reduce the risk of developing cancer by reducing workplace stress.

Twitter is worse than other platforms because the format is really contrived. The 280 character limit doesn't give people space to write a nuanced, fair, well thought out response to things.

Also, if you contrast twitter and reddit, I would say that on reddit, everyone is kind of on the same footing more or less. Anyone can post a thread and if the content is interesting, it can rise to the top, then every response in that thread also has an equal chance to have visibility. The design of twitter is made so that masses of people follow some small number of "influencers", and these people have an outsized voice. There is no upvote or downvote, it seems to be largely based on how many followers you have.

The fact that there's no specific topical discussion groups I think also really amplifies the toxicity of the platform, because twitter can suck a bunch of people who have nothing to do with the discussion into the flamewar, as a way to increase "engagement". On a platform like HN, you have discussions about programming, and they're split into threads which people can choose to read or not. Reddit is split into subreddits on a variety of topics. It doesn't actively try to rope random people into some bullshit drama they have nothing to do with.

And uh, fun fact: twitter is not profitable, more than 15 years after they were founded, 8 years after their IPO. The stock has basically gone nowhere. It's a wonder they're still here, despite their lack of innovation and lack of business sense. IMO, the world would be better without this platform, but uh, I guess once your tech company gets past a certain size, it can never go bankrupt?

Hopefully the market will eventually sort it out.

Definitely. A huge chunk of Python and Ruby packages are written as "C extensions", and if those C extensions are going to get compiled on some platform the developers haven't tested them on, it will make for fun surprise bugs.

I know Java has C extensions for some things too. I'm curious how much code is actually "pure Java", but I've actually rarely seen Java used at any of the places I worked at.

Or maybe it's a personal assistant that lives in your phone and asks you how you're doing everyday, acts like a friend, inquires about your mental health and well-being... And then subtly nudges you in the direction of buying X,Y,Z thing or service to help you fill that existential void in your life.

This video is so silicon valley, it's amazing. They've obviously spent a lot of money producing it, but it's all vague claims, there isn't even a compelling demo. I'm guessing they're aiming for an audience of mainstream journalists, but they're not actually launching a new product per-se. What gives? Why are they trying to hype something that's not ready, isn't going to be released as a product, and that they're not willing to properly showcase or even explain at any level of detail?

People are downvoting you but you're not wrong. One of the biggest factors behind Apple's success is that they've positioned themselves as a status symbol. They're the Prada of the tech world. I switched from an iPhone to an Android recently and found the quality of the device and software to be just as good if not better, but an Android doesn't say "I'm upper middle class" like an iPhone does.

Me, I see spatial audio and I'm like... Ah, that's annoying, because it's yet another proprietary gimmick, and it means the format will likely be incompatible with everything else. You could see a proliferation of audio files that are only usable on Apple devices. Stereo seems... Based in physical reality, ubiquitous, and very practical. I hope Google doesn't try to copy them just like they did after Apple decided to remove the headphone jack, because that wasn't an upgrade. Deprecating trusted, reliable technology to try to entice buyers is not an upgrade.

If anyone is curious what this automated missile defense looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biyUjm4KZio

It's an automated, super fast, self-aiming gatling gun.

> Unpopular opinion but the central banks are the main source of inflation.

I mean, that seems obvious, there can't really be inflation if the money supply doesn't increase, can there?

If the money supply stays fixed, then some people will save/hoard money. Some people will also be more able than others to acquiring money (possibly because they already owned assets/rental property), maybe they were born rich. The amount of money that is circulating will automatically decrease. That tends to produce deflation.

The problem is that if you have deflation in your economy, it also increases the incentive for people to save/hoard money even more. Why would you spend your money today when it will be worth more later? You have a feedback loop where the amount of money circulating just keeps decreasing, and so prices automatically have to go down.

> From what I've seen, there are a lot of right-wing people in tech circles expressing a support for capitalism. However, very few of these people know or care how the economy works.

Fair point. Most people don't know or care how the economy works, left or right. My main point was: it's to your advantage to know how the system works, and it's maybe even more important to understand how it works if you hope to change it.

If you don't understand what is inflation and its impact, or basic economics, then politicians can take advantage of your lack of knowledge, in the same way a shady car mechanic can take advantage of uninformed customers. They might pretend that certain policies will help lower-income people when what they are doing is most beneficial to the ultra-rich.

To expand on this, when you're a kid, things that affect you emotionally can seem to have disproportionate impact on your life. When you're older and more experienced, you've been through many crisis situations, and you've seen that things usually work out OK. You know better how to deal with various situations, and you have a much more realistic predictions of how things will eventually unfold.

You probably also know, from experience, that even if you have an initial emotional reaction to something, that doesn't mean you should trust those emotions and roll with them. Getting angry rarely fixes anything, feeling sad is normal but it doesn't mean your life is going to shit, and getting excited about something is good, but you know it might not be worth getting excited too quickly.

From what I've seen, there are a lot of people in tech circles expressing anti-capitalist sentiment. However, very few of these people know or care how the economy works. This is very unfortunate, because I think it's useful to try and understand how the system works if you want to have any hope of improving it. Or at least, if you understand how things are trending, you might be able to better prepare and protect yourself and your friends/family.

The average person doesn't understand what inflation is, why it happens, how it affects them and how the government uses inflation to reduce the significance of its debt. The average person also tends to believe government inflation numbers which, IMO, are manipulated and do not represent what is actually happening in the world. For instance, home prices (and thus rents) are rapidly increasing, and housing costs, for most people, are the biggest expense they have to think about, accounting for sometimes more than 50% of their take home pay.

> My two cents is that Musk (being on the spectrum) is driven in a different way than Bezos (and therefore, being obsessive to a greater degree [1], making him more involved "on the ground", leading to SpaceX's success).

My perspective, having watched multiple interviews of Elon and Bezos, is that Musk is just really passionate about tech. He's an engineer at heart, that's why he's directly involved in the development of the tech, which is central to all of his businesses. He's also a risk taker and a pioneer, he's not afraid of taking big risky bets on unproven technologies, he seems to actually enjoy doing that, and proving people wrong.

Bezos, on the other hand, is passionate about business and making money. He would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works. Once he sees that something is going to be financially successful, he tries to copy it. Amazon is successful because it has good execution, economies of scale and competitive pricing, but it wasn't the first online retailer, or the first cloud provider, etc.

I don't know if I would invest in Blue Origin. Personally, I think Rocket Lab is a much more interesting company (that is already trading on public markets). It's being led by someone who is genuinely passionate about space and has a proven orbital launch vehicle. I wish I could invest in SpaceX, but IMO Rocket Lab is the next best thing to invest in, a mini SpaceX.

Why isn't Linux configured to better preserve battery life on laptops by default? Power usage has been an issue for over a decade. If it's just a matter of a few tweaks, surely it could be done?

Here is a post from 2016 outlining the same problem I was describing: https://superuser.com/questions/1103966/windows-update-doesn...

There is a bug in the Windows Update client on Windows 8.1, and it can't update itself.